Sponsorship

 A common form of promotion for events is Sponsorship, Sponsorship can be defined as follows:

        ‘Sponsorship is a mutually beneficial arrangement that consists of the provision of resources of funds, goods and/or services ... in return for a set of rights that can be used in communications activity, for the achievements of objectives for commercial gain.’

Masterman, Guy (2007) Sponsorship For A Return on Investment, London: Elsevier

Objectives of Sponsorship

•   Enhancing Image/Shaping Consumer Attitudes 
•  Driving Sales
• Creating positive publicity/heightening visibility - 
• Differentiating from competitors
• Helping with good "Corporate Citizen" role
• Enhancing business, consumer and VIP relations
• Increase sales

http://www.frugalmarketing.com/dtb/sponsorship.shtml

McFly Sponsorship

McFLY have chosen 'Ice-Watch' to sponsor them on their upcoming April tour, as 'Ice-Watch' are a 'cool, young' brand they obviously would want to support something similar to them, and McFLY are obvious a big attraction to this type of target audience. By Ice-Watch sponsoring McFLY this gives McFLY fans a chance to win prizes which include t-shirts, meet and greets with the band and also tickets to the tour itself. By offering these special prizes to the fans, which are an obvious attraction as it is to do with the band, it is also giving Ice-Watch recognization as all fans have to do is click 'LIKE' on the facebook page and then enter the competition, this is easily giving Ice-Watch more viewers and fans on their own page. As McFLY and Ice-Watch are now linked together, the fans will instantly think it's cool to own their own Ice-Watch.

 When fans of the boys see them wearing 'Ice-Watch' it will be a big influence towards the fans going out and buying one, therefore 'Ice-Watch' are making a profit from this. With celebrity endorsement towards a product there is always a bigger chance that it is going to sell better.

London Fashion Weekend Sponsorship

On the other hand London Fashion Weekend take a completely different approach to McFLY, instead of having one main sponsor they have a fair few. Vodafone are the principal sponsor of the event. Instead of looking into every single sponsorship and what they do for the event, I have chosen to go into more detail with Vodafone and what they intend to do for the event as they are the principle sponsor. They are proud sponsors and customers of Vodafone are able to get unrivalled access to the world of fashion via tickets and unique 'money can't buy' experiences. Vodafone are able to offer customers the chance to buy tickets for the event 48 hours before they go on sale and be on the front row for the catwalk to see the latest trends before they hit the high street. www.vodafone.co.uk /vip

When first googling London Fashion Weekend, the first thing that actually came up was the Vodafone website. This was an instant package that users are able to purchase by being a Vodafone user. Then when you actually click to go onto the website the main message they want to give is that they are sponsoring the event 'We've joined forces with some of Britain's biggest retailers to bring you everything from out of hours shopping experiences to London Fashion Weekend sponsorship. We'll be updating these great offers throughout the year, so check back regularly to see what's new.'  

Target audiences

Every event should have a target market, this is something that needs to be discussed before all the advertising and promotions are done. The four P's product, place, promotion and price make up the marketing mix strategy and are the main reason for any success in any event.
Without a target audience, the marketing mix cannot be built as the event would have no idea who they are supposed to be aiming their promotions at and who they actually need to satisfy.


As McFLY are a 'typical' boyband, you would instantly think that the target audience is obviously going to be younger girls around 11+. Since 2004 McFLY have had a strong fan base who attend every tour they hold.So over the years McFLY have achieved their own audience, who go back and are willing to always pay money to see them.
Recently, McFLY have slipped and have lost a lot of their fan base from not doing as much touring/releasing new albums. But before this tour, each of the individuals have participated in different TV shows which is regaining a wider audience. Harry took part in 'Strictly Come Dancing' which he won, Dougie took part in 'I'm a celebrity get me out of here' which he also won. Tom and Danny have also took part in the shows 'Popstar to Operastar' and 'The Cube' all of these are well known shows which are able to get them a bigger fan base.

As I could not find anything specific on McFLY website about their target audience, I decided to research into the actual target audience of all boy bands. I found a website which McFLY were listed on-
http://www.thecleaningservice.djteresa.net/BoyBandsCaliberRecords.pdf

According to this website the target audience of boy bands is -
The target market for boy bands consists of tweens and teens aged 10-19 and tend to be predominatly female. There are currently 20,549,505 people in the 10-14 age  group within 10,026,028 being female. The largest growth segment is the 15-19 age group with an 8.25% growth over 1995, representing nearly 1.6 million new people in the segment. There are 20,528,072 teens in this segment and 10,087,875 of them are female. The peak growth is in the 15-19 age group with diminishing growth trends in the younger age groups.
Although this information is quite old I still believe that this is the main target audience for McFLY.

On the other hand, London Fashion Week tend to attract the complete opposite, although both of the target audiences are mainly girls the things that they are interested in vary on completely different levels.

On the London Fashion Weekend website, i found who they think their target audience actually is, from the image above I have found out that the average person who attends the event is a part of the socio-economic group ABC1, a female who is around the age of 29. The average spend per person at the event is £60. London Fashion Week think the main people who attend the event are -

• mothers and daughters
• females with a high disposable income 
• a 'girly' day out

As London Fashion Weekend have discovered their target audience, this makes it a lot easier for them to provide suitable advertisements which aren't going to go to waste. For example there is no point in advertising the event in a mens magazine, advertising in something like Vogue would be targetting the audience that they want to.